The positive case for Joe Biden

It's not just about being anti-Trump.

It’s politics season in America, so I’m going to write a bit about politics.

Trump was doing very well in the polls a few months ago, but Biden has surged lately, and both polls and betting markets now have the candidates essentially even. Back in January, I wrote a post making the case against voting for Trump:

A vote for Trump is a vote for chaos

Trump’s chaotic and dictatorial nature, by itself, is easily enough of a reason to cast a vote for Biden in November. But I also think that Biden has been a good President in his own right. So in this post I want to explain why unless something major changes, I plan to vote for Biden, instead of simply against Trump.

I am not a Biden shill

In my post about Trump, I started off with a whole section explaining why I don’t have “Trump derangement syndrome” — in fact, Trump did a number of good things in his first term, and I gave him credit for these. So I want to start this post off with something similar — I want to explain why I’m not a simple knee-jerk Biden supporter who tries to justify everything Biden does. In fact, I have plenty to complain about.

For one thing, I think Biden has done too much deficit spending. The American Rescue Plan of 2021 had a lot of good stuff in it — for example, the expanded child tax credit — but it was fundamentally based on the mistaken idea that the country’s economic situation in 2021 was similar to its situation in 2020. The pandemic was still raging in 2021, but people had stopped hiding in their houses, and the economy was already recovering.

The CARES Act of 2020 was basically a bailout rather than a stimulus bill — the point was to make sure that people weren’t financially ruined during the time of social distancing. But because people were already spending again in 2021, the ARP acted more like a stimulus bill. It put a bunch of money in Americans’ pockets, and this time they went right out and spent it (along with some money that they had saved up from the CARES Act). That accelerated the recovery, but it also led to higher inflation. The U.S. was already suffering from supply chain disruptions, and then a brief oil price shock in 2022; the extra cash provided by the ARP poured a bit of fuel on that fire, contributing modestly to two years of declining real incomes for most Americans.

And some of the spending in the ARP consisted of health insurance subsidies, which is likely to push up prices in that industry without alleviating supply constraints or controlling costs.

Biden exacerbated all this with his student loan cancellation. This plan was extremely expensive, and will continue to be expensive going forward. It was not something we needed to do; instead, it was an attempt to win over the lefty youth, despite the fact that student loans aren’t a big priority for most young people and the lefty kids now hate Biden over Palestine anyway.

In general, Biden’s main domestic policy failing is that he’s too willing to throw subsidies at overpriced service industries, like health, education, child care, and so on, without any attempt to control costs in these industries. This is rooted in the new progressive consensus that “care jobs” represent the future of work, and that by subsidizing these industries, we can both make them cheaper for the average American and also create lots of jobs. But without measures to increase supply and improve efficiency, this pushes up prices. And in an era of high interest rates, it’s not clear the government can afford the extra debt.

In addition, Biden is a very old man. Although I think he seems more mentally acute than many people give him credit for — and more mentally acute than Trump, who is only three years younger and tends to ramble and fall asleep in court — age definitely does take a toll. This manifests in Biden occasionally saying foolish things and relying on outdated stereotypes, such as when he labeled key allies Japan and India “xenophobic”. Also, Biden’s age probably means less centralized leadership on economic policy.

So I am not a Biden shill. There is plenty that could be improved about his presidency, and the above is by no means an exhaustive list. But the positives strongly outweigh the negatives, so let’s talk about those.

Biden made industrial policy a reality

Throughout my entire life, I’ve heard Americans talk about the need to revive American manufacturing. First the Rust Belt and then the China Shock hollowed out the manufacturing workforce — employment plunged, and output stagnated. And yet neither Bush nor Obama seemed to have any plan for how to make it happen.

Trump talked a big game about bringing manufacturing back to America, but his signature initiative — the tariffs — didn’t make any headway in terms of reshoring. Trump’s attempt to harangue American companies into no longer shipping jobs overseas, and his bungled attempt to get Foxconn to build a factory in rural Wisconsin, were even less effective. There was no perceptible increase in factory construction, manufacturing output, or employment.

Then came Biden. With a pair of landmark bills — the (somewhat misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act — he enacted America’s first real systematic manufacturing-oriented industrial policy since at least the early 1990s, and possibly since World War 2. A massive factory construction boom began almost immediately after the bills were signed:

Note that this graph is adjusted for the cost of new industrial building construction. So this isn’t a graph of inflation we’re looking at — this is a huge increase in actual construction. You can also see a big bump in construction employment in the nonresidential sector — despite the commercial real estate bust!

What kind of factories are being built? The new spending is mostly on chips and batteries:

Source: Joey Politano

So this is clearly a result of Biden’s two big bills. The U.S., which so often finds itself unable to build anything, is actually building something.

It’s still early days, of course. In fact, manufacturing output and employment haven’t risen yet! Building factories takes time. There are still many hurdles yet to overcome, and it’s a learning process. But finally, a President actually did something to restore U.S. manufacturing. After all those years of talk, someone did something, and that someone was Joe Biden.

The bigger question, of course, is: Was this the right thing to do? Plenty of people say that we shouldn’t be focusing on manufacturing at all — that we should simply step back and let the free market do its work, and that industrial policy is wasteful. We won’t know for a while whether they’re right. But what we do know is that China is ramping up its manufacturing machine to an incredible degree; in the face of that competition, we can either simply stop making anything in tradable manufactured goods and let our main rival do it all, while we specialize in agriculture and finance, or we can try to fight back.

“Fight back” is obviously the correct option. The usefulness of an economy is not measured purely in dollars of profit; an industrial economy is absolutely necessary in order to sustain a modern military that can keep us safe in the face of unprecedented external threats. Finance and agriculture cannot, by themselves, defend us against Chinese drones, missiles, and warships. Only manufacturing can do that. Semiconductors and batteries are incredibly crucial to defense manufacturing — chips are essential for every military device, especially precision weapons, and batteries power many of the drones that are taking over the battlefield. And of course, batteries are essential for fighting climate change, too.

In other words, Biden picked exactly the right industries to support. And our success or failure in supporting those industries will yield priceless insights for future efforts in other industries, like drones, ships, etc.

Meanwhile, the impact of this factory spending is widely distributed throughout the country — new battery factories are mostly in the South and Midwest, while a bunch of new chip factories are in Arizona, Texas, upstate New York, and the Mountain West. This means that industrial policy won’t just pour ever more investment into a few coastal “superstar” cities, as was the norm for the previous three decades.

This is the most consequential change in U.S. economic policy since Ronald Reagan. Trump may have been the one to smash the old free-trade laissez-faire consensus, but Biden is the first to start building something new in its place.

Biden is mostly good on foreign policy

In the memorable words of Xi Jinping, the world is facing “great changes unseen in a century”. The rise of China has changed absolutely everything. Suddenly, aggressive, authoritarian countries like Russia, Iran, and North Korea are no longer “rogue states” — they are members of an axis whose economic, industrial, and demographic heft rivals that of the U.S. and all of its allies combined.

In the face of that new axis, any U.S. President would struggle, but Biden has done extremely well given the circumstances.

First, he got the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Our forces had mostly been drawn down already under Obama, after the death of Bin Laden; Trump kept a skeleton force there and basically kicked the can down the road. Biden knew that being enmeshed in a “forever war” that had little hope of transforming Afghanistan into a stable country, much less a liberal democracy, was crippling the U.S.’ ability to respond to much more important threats. Therefore he did the right thing and withdrew. The withdrawal was executed well, with the only U.S. casualties being the 13 victims of an ISIS bombing. The only real blemish on the whole operation was the U.S.’ refusal to admit more Afghan translators and other collaborators as refugees.

With regards to China, Biden has done more than any other President — by far. Stupid gaffes notwithstanding, he has beefed up our alliances and quasi-alliances with India, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia, reinvigorating the Quad and creating AUKUS. The Philippines is allowing the U.S. to build bases on its soil for the first time in many years — bases that are very close to Taiwan and could help defend the island from invasion. Modi’s visit to the U.S. was an epochal moment in U.S.-India relations. Of course, much more needs to be done in order to forge a regional alliance capable of deterring China. But Biden has made important moves in the direction of that regional alliance, which neither Trump nor Obama did.

Biden has also dramatically strengthened U.S. export controls on the Chinese semiconductor industry. These won’t stop China’s progress, but they will slow it down and give America a fighting chance to preserve a world where the chips that tell American weapons where to strike aren’t all made in China. Export controls were a Trump innovation, but Biden has scaled them up to have real teeth.

It’s on Ukraine, though, that Biden did the best. Vladimir Putin’s decision to violate the norm against international conquest that had prevailed since World War 2 was a watershed moment — the end of the post-WW2 period and the beginning of a new era of great-power competition and instability. Had Russia been able to overrun Ukraine, it would now be menacing the rest of Europe. But because Joe Biden rushed a ton of weapons to Ukraine, the Ukrainians were able to defend their country, expel the Russians from about half of the territory they seized, and turn the war into the stalemate it is now. Russia’s casualties have been enormous — 450,000 dead and wounded, by the latest estimate, plus many thousands of armored vehicles destroyed.

Meanwhile, Biden’s sweeping sanctions and quick diplomacy ended up pushing Europe to unite more than it has…well, possibly ever. Sweden and Finland even joined NATO. Whereas Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO, and threatened to let Russia conquer allied countries, under Biden the alliance has become more vigorous, unified, and purposeful than it has been since the 1980s. Sweden and Norway even emerged from neutrality to join.

Thus, Russia, instead of conquering Ukraine and facing a divided, fractious Europe with its Soviet-era military hardware intact, now holds only a fifth of Ukraine and faces a united Europe, with much of its Soviet inheritance lying in ruins. That’s due to the valiance of the Ukrainian defenders and the financial aid of the Europeans, but Biden’s timely commitment of weapons played the decisive role. For that alone, Biden is the best foreign policy President since George H.W. Bush.

And U.S. support for Ukraine had another salutary effect — it was a wake-up call about the fact that the U.S. defense-industrial base has badly atrophied. The U.S. does not have the manufacturing capability to defend against China, but thanks to our Lend-Lease support for Ukraine, we now realize that we need to build it. And some efforts are actually happening ahead of schedule:

This isn’t nearly enough, of course. We need to build lots more missiles and ships, not just artillery shells, if we’re going to be able to deter China. But it’s a start, and it shows that the U.S. isn’t entirely still asleep about our military production deficiencies. Under Trump, we probably would still be asleep.

And then there’s the Gaza war. As I’ve said, I think Biden has been too conciliatory to Benjamin Netanyahu, and too reluctant to simply disengage from the Middle East and pivot to Asia. But that having been said, Biden has done a much better job than Trump would have done in terms of navigating a sensible middle path through the thorny conflict:

Of course the leftist kids give Biden no credit for this, but the leftist kids are silly.

Basically, on foreign policy, both ends of the horseshoe — the extremists of the MAGA Right and the “decolonial” Left — have united against Biden. That is a strong sign that he’s doing something right.

Biden has been a decent steward of the economy — and of public safety

Finally, we get to the bread-and-butter issues that affect most Americans’ daily lives. The economy is the thing many voters are still mad at Biden about — two years of real income declines will leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. And although some of the factors causing inflation were beyond Biden’s control, his spending probably did exacerbate the problem a bit, as I said before.

But Biden did a lot to help quell the inflation, too. First, and most importantly, he reappointed Jerome Powell as Fed chair. Many progressives had worried that Powell was too hawkish, and would cause a recession with too many interest rate hikes. But Biden stayed the course, and that turned out to be the right move. Powell’s rate hikes helped bring inflation down — not all the way to the 2% target, but enough so that real wages have started to grow again and are now on their pre-pandemic trend:

Source: Arin Dube

In fact, Biden did one other thing to help bring down inflation: He increased oil production. Although he came into office expecting to curb fracking in the name of the climate, the Ukraine war prompted an about-face. Biden opened up drilling, and the U.S. now produces more oil than any country ever has in the history of the world.

Cheaper oil doesn’t just make gasoline cheaper (although it does do that). It allows all kinds of businesses to move people and goods around more cheaply, allowing to produce things more cheaply — which lowers inflation.

So Biden did two big things to stop inflation — reappointed Powell, and ensured cheap, plentiful oil. Both of those were in the face of pressure from his own party, and showed a lot of courage and leadership. Less spending on health insurance and student debt would have taken a little of the edge off inflation in 2021, but Biden’s actions to bring down inflation in 2022 and 2023 outweigh the mistake.

Oh, and Biden’s administration also just casually stopped a banking crisis in its tracks back in early 2023. It was such a flawless victory that almost no one even remembers the panic!

Now the U.S. economy is humming on all cylinders. Wages are rising, growth is fast, productivity is growing, young people are doing better than their parents, wealth is up, employment is great, and so on. This Goldilocks situation won’t last forever, but it took some skillful macroeconomic management to get us here, and Biden — and the people in his administration — deserve some of the credit.

Another big thing Biden got right was crime. Violence surged under Donald Trump in 2020, and many feared that we might be seeing a repeat of the 1970s, when crime stayed sky-high for more than two decades. But under Biden, the murder rate has fallen dramatically:

Source: Axios

And the trend is continuing in 2024.

Does Biden get any of the credit for this? Well, yes, a bit. In 2020, many progressives were calling to defund the police; Biden fought against this idea from day 1. In fact, he has consistently supported hiring a lot more cops, together with various other measures to curb violence. And in fact, more cops have been hired; there are now more police working in America than ever before. Cops do help prevent crime — sorry, police abolitionists! — so Biden’s steadfast refusal to entertain notions of defunding the police probably gets a bit of the credit for the drop in crime.

So on the daily issues that affect Americans the most, Joe Biden has generally been an effective and responsible leader. And he has done this at the same time that he has strengthened U.S. alliances, halted Russia in its tracks, and begun a needed transformation of U.S. economic policy.

Not bad for an 81 year old, eh? It’s all about hiring good help. Anyway, given that record, I’m strongly inclined to keep Biden around for another 4 years. It’s not just that the alternative is so bad; Biden really has done a good job.

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